


Before You Know It

by bunnoculars



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 07:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13566138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: Villa and Messi, orbiting each other before and after their short time together at Barcelona.





	Before You Know It

**Author's Note:**

> I became a Barcelona fan because of Villa after the 2010 World Cup, and watching that team I became a football fan. Villa leaving Barça and then Europe was my first time saying goodbye to a personal hero, and his departure coincided with the end of an era for the club (and for Spain as well, but that's another story). I still find it all kind of hard to get over haha.

**Winter 2008**

Leo can’t remember when they met. The time he’s felt like he’s known him goes back further than that, anyway.

At first, there are two Villas. One he sees from across the field, hunched and scowling, sending Valdés into the locker room at half so wound up he can barely speak. The other is called Guaje. He hears about him sometimes from his national teammates at Barça, too much heart to believe, the butt of Xavi’s jokes.

Then Leo starts to spend some time with him here and there, and the lines get blurred a little. At sponsorship events he’s silent, stiff and stony-faced until he’s not, opening up to everyone by degrees, until Leo starts to feel left behind. When they speak he has trouble with Leo’s accent, watches him carefully and laughs at Leo’s dumb jokes when he catches up.

He decides he likes Villa better when he’s not trying to be nice, something like that. Maybe he just doesn’t want to know what Villa sees when he looks at him. And so he keeps his distance, just follows the same rule he has for strangers and keeps to himself, never looks first, never talks first. 

In February, Barcelona faces Valencia in the Copa semifinal, fight between two Spanish giants in free-fall, and the best they can do is a draw. Villa surprises him when it’s over, grabs his shoulder and pulls Leo back down to earth, back into the moment. He’s saying something, but it doesn’t compute. Camp Nou is still seething like a cauldron and Villa scored today and Leo didn’t, and somehow nothing Leo’s team does ever feels like it should.

“…change shirts with me?” 

Louder this time, right into Leo’s ear as he leans in, and somehow that’s the last thing he expects. It’s not that no one has asked him before, because they have, but Villa is different. He’s different and he’s deadly serious, staring into Leo’s face like he might say no, and for some reason that’s funny to him.

He reaches out and his hand grapples Villa’s shirt of its own accord, half reassurance and half confirmation, cool whisper of skin beneath. For a couple hideous seconds Leo struggles to get his off, but his stomach settles as Villa falls into step with him on the way to the tunnel. 

Their silence is mostly drowned out by the night sounds and the rumbling in the stands. Villa is still glowing from the game, looking happier with a draw than Leo is with a win these days, and Leo is finding it harder not to look at him, keeps forgetting.

It doesn’t take Villa long to catch his eyes, and he shakes his head like he knows what Leo is thinking.

“You’ll never know how it feels to get out of here alive,” he says, and then, more to himself, “Today was a good day.”

Leo has no answer to that, but Villa isn’t looking for one, anyway. 

When it’s time to part, Villa tells him, “Good luck next week,” patting him on the back and peeling off towards the guest dressing room.

“You too,” Leo blurts out before he gets too far away, because he still hasn’t said anything. “You deserve it.”

Villa is momentarily caught off guard, wide dark eyes, but then he just shakes his head and snorts, like Leo is fucking with him or something, and Leo lets Villa think it’s a joke because it seems safer that way, lets him scrub a hand through Leo’s hair and then push away.

Xavi smiles when he sees the shirt in Leo’s hand, but his expression corrodes as it forms, harsh and unnatural.

“He should be in Madrid,” he says shortly when he sees Leo’s face, “and now he might end up in the Segunda.”

**Fall 2009**

When opportunity arises, Leo seizes it. While reporters swarm Kaká and Ronaldo and the rest, all the big, handsome megawatt stars that burn as bright off the field, he slips out a side door and into the quiet. There’s an endless maze of hallways and another couple hours of obligations between him and escape, but he doesn’t care at this point. The need to get out has become pure lizard brained instinct, buzzing in his skull.

He’s totally lost by the time he finds the first door that leads out. He’s ready for the scourge of sunburst, so the weak half-light settles obliquely in the pit of his stomach, strange sense of loss. Then he hears a voice, looks over and sees Villa hunched against the wall with a phone to his ear.

Dark eyes flick up to him, catching him out, and somehow Leo feels more flat-footed and out of place than he has all night. For a split second he hates Villa’s melodic accent, the wrinkle in his brow and the sharp lines of his body. He’s about to give up and head back to his doom when Villa gives him a quick smile, waves his hand as if to say it’s nothing important.

Leo hesitates, then crumples down to sit on the other side of the door, closing his eyes, whole world eclipsed in a veil of dull red, and does his best not to listen. It seems like forever since he’s felt the wind on his face, feels nice.

Villa goes quiet and time passes. Each moment lengthens until Leo can’t stand it anymore, glances over to see if he’s still there. He is. Head bowed, legs folded up to his chest, hand dangling lifelessly, an articulation of Leo’s own deadening boredom. For the first time all day, Leo wants to laugh, then realizes he’s staring and cuts his eyes away before Villa catches him at it.

He wants to talk, now, too, but neither of them have anything to say to each other. From afar Leo knows him better than ever, the Villa in red on his television and the one in black and white he’s watched up close, but then he sees him in person, and every time it’s exactly like this. Both of them silent, both of them waiting maybe.

Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s saying, “Did you get the new FIFA yet,” just as Villa starts to ask after his family, and his insides shrivel up because for a moment there he let himself think Villa was just as shy and awkward as he is.

His stomach unclenches torturously as he stares down at the pavement, tense couple of seconds before Villa huffs in amusement, slanting him a look that brushes across his face like fingertips.

“Aren’t you the poster boy for Pro Evo?”

“That’s just business,” Leo tells him, and Villa’s laugh flips a switch inside him, wave of calm that flatlines his nerves. 

When he looks up again he watches Villa’s smile as it fades and he turns away, barely aware he’s answering it. He looks so different, like this, saturnine face shattered by laugh lines and uneven teeth.

“You play?” Villa asks him offhandedly.

Leo just nods, not wanting to let on how much. Somehow Villa has never seemed as old as Xavi does to him, even though they’re probably the same age, and Leo is reluctant to test the difference between them. But Villa surprises him.

“Me too,” he says. “I’m still on 08, I think? I don’t have a lot of time and things don’t change all that much year-to-year.” Villa’s being totally serious, like he’s explaining himself or something. Then his mouth curls as the irony catches up with him, and he looks to Leo again. “What’s your rating now? A hundred, or what?”

Part of him wants to tell Villa that things _haven’t_ changed that much, he’s not Ronaldinho but he’s got his shirt and his legacy, and part of him can’t believe how long the last two years have been. But Villa won’t get it, anyway, can’t—he’s spent all that time elsewhere, an existence totally apart from everything Leo thinks he knows about him.

“90,” is all he says. “You’re an 87.”

Villa shakes his head, expression slipping between poles, and Leo’s not sure if he’s fighting a laugh, or trying to force it.

“Three points between you and me,” Villa says helplessly, raking his hand through his hair, and somehow it’s still perfect when he’s done. “Video games are crazy.”

His voice is tightly controlled and twisted up and it throws Leo off balance. He’s not sure if he should be flattered that even someone like Villa can’t stomach comparing himself to Leo, if it would make it worse to tell Villa that he’s been watching him play since before he debuted at Barça, that he still has his shirt, that he thinks he looks cool and some secret side of him looks forward to seeing him at these stupid things, that what Villa is to Spain, Leo wishes with all his heart he could be for Argentina.

“It should have been you,” the words tripping out of his mouth before he knows what he’s doing.

Villa doesn’t understand. “Eh?”

“Everyone wanted you to come. Xavi, Puyi, Andrés, all of them.” Leo’s mouth has gone bone dry. Straight shot past the point of no return, but Villa has gone still, surprise leaching out of his features by degrees until his face is totally blank, and Leo doesn’t like it. “I thought it was going to be you.”

_I wanted it to be you._

His anger over Samu’s ouster had faded quicker than it had over the others, ghost of the summer before, but he’d chased the feeling, not wanting to let go of that part of himself, the Barcelona that had gnawed at his heart and preyed on his sleep when it’d seemed like his time would never come. At first he hadn’t wanted to understand; once it was over he’d just wanted to ignore it, Xavi’s brittle professionalism, Pep’s high-minded justifications, his own growing expectations. And yet he’s had nothing but time to think; it’s October and he’s still thinking.

Perhaps it’s just the changing light and play of shadows, but suddenly Leo is seeing another side of Villa, too young for his years and maybe too old for this kind of honesty. The moment lodges in Leo’s chest, hurts even as it starts to pass.

“I’ve thought a lot of things before,” Villa says at last.

 

 

November 29, 2010. 

 

May 28, 2011.

 

 

**Spring 2013**

Leo can’t run anymore.

He lies there, staring up at the sky and breathing. The short grass prickles against his arms, and his shirt is already molding to his back, second skin. He’s untroubled by the sounds of the world turning, distant thunder of footsteps, shouts and curses, all the stories the ball tells when someone kicks it.

Villa is still sitting next to him, taking long pulls from his water bottle and squinting into the sun. Leo wants to know what kind of gel he uses, because he’s winded and his face shines with sweat, but his hair has survived intact. He’s shared a locker room with the man for three years and he still doesn’t know that, somehow.

He looks as long as he likes, because Villa won’t catch him at it, all the more if he feels his eyes on him. When he tires of that, too, he goes back to nothing.

“Do you even remember Madrid before Ronaldo came? Raúl, Guti, all them. Zidane. I played with Morientes at Valencia, but that was later.”

Leo isn’t surprised by Villa exactly, just doesn’t know if he’s supposed to answer, or where this is coming from. In all the small in-between moments Villa never stops talking, especially during training when he’s trying to forget how tired he is.

“It’s crazy, thinking four, five years back,” Villa goes on eventually, and Leo stares into the sky so long the blue starts to move, pinpricks of light. “I always forget things so fast.”

Villa’s said in an interview once that he’d be able to show his grandchildren pictures of the two of them together, and tell them he’d played with Messi.

“I asked for his shirt,” Leo cuts in quickly, blindly. “Zidane. That was my first game at the Bernabéu. We won because of Ronaldinho, and then I asked him.” 

At Ronaldinho’s name, Villa lights up like a kid, and then he’s a million miles away again, picking at the grass, picking at his memories. Leo has a few of his own, but he doesn’t like to think how small and normal everything in this life has gotten, when it’s still just as far away, just as unreachable as it had been when it’d looked like the whole world to him. Time cheapens everything.

“We used to spend so much time in training figuring out how to deal with Ronaldinho. Then we’d get there, and just like that! He made us suffer every time. You were ten times worse, of course.” 

Villa’s voice is low, matter-of-fact, and Leo still doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to return the compliment and tell him how crazy he drove them before he came here.

“Things aren’t any different now. Football is just winning and losing,” Leo says, just to get Villa to stop. His chest is tight with all the things he wants to tell him, that it’s all the same across time, the game never changes no matter who’s involved, what year it is, how old you are, how good you are, that the details don’t mean anything and and and.

But all it comes down to is that the time they’ve spent together is nothing. Barcelona is all Leo has ever known, but that’s not true for Villa. He’s won and he’s lost things everywhere he’s gone. He’ll probably keep doing it until his legs give out on him, another four to five season eternity in some place neither of them know yet, and for the first time Leo feels his age, sees all the years between them rising like a wall.

Leo had thought it was over in January. Now it’s like he hasn’t learned anything since Ronaldinho and Deco and Eto’o, even Ibra. 

When he’d come back to them at the beginning of the season, Villa had looked the same, felt the same, but he’d changed just as much, and just as bitterly, as everything else. He’d chased all the time he’d lost into October, November, December, would have gone after it to the ends of the earth if he could have. Leo had lived with a sickening, endless kind of fury, watching him, watching the team, the hole where Pep had been, all those spaces where Leo had long since learned to stop looking for Villa.

It had been a different kind of anger when Xavi had let him know that Villa was going to stay after all, violent heady rush that had made him stupid for days and days, and then disappeared without him noticing. The whole world might have decided they hate each other now, but all Leo has ever wanted is for things to be the way they were. Villa wants different things, maybe, things he doesn’t want to understand. But after the remontada against Milan he’d begun to dream again, and then came Pep’s Bayern, and now here they are. It was dumb.

Villa is the one looking now (finally), peering down at him, face shadowed and gilded in sunlight, strangely solemn.

“I thought things might be different here. Feel different, or something,” Villa admits, finally, so carefully his words twist Leo’s stomach. And then, “If I could have stayed at Sporting, maybe. Who knows.”

There’s a question in his voice, vague, unanswered, and it’s so unlike him all Leo can do is lay there and let it happen as Villa breaks the moment, rises and stands over him, sudden and inevitable. It takes him a minute to recognize the hand Villa is offering him. He’s tired, so tired, he doesn’t want to move ever again. He takes it.

**Spring 2014**

After the game Villa is the last person Leo wants to see. That’s true a lot of the time these days, but today it’s worse. He’s working on narrowing his world into the length of his legs stretched out in front of him, and Villa is buzzing around the edge of his consciousness, fresh and satiated, sobered, free with his affection and his time. He wishes Villa had said goodbye to this place for good a year ago, doesn’t like how many ways he’s never really left them.

Eventually Villa runs out of people to hug and takes a seat a few lockers down from Leo. Of course. Xavi.

At first Leo had thought that Xavi had taken Villa’s departure better than he had. It was inevitable: Villa wanted to play, deserved to play, if not at Barça then elsewhere; Villa needed time and space to learn his new body before the World Cup; and he didn’t have anything holding him back, not ego or history or sentiment. Then the season wore on, and at some point it stopped meaning something when Xavi did everything alone again, and then Atlético started winning and he buried himself in silence, bitter and reflective.

It fucks with Leo. Makes him wonder what it’ll be like when he has to start climbing down from the life he’s built, if he’ll know, too. Ronaldinho is long gone, Pep has left them, and Tito has passed away, and maybe he’ll be a new person in a couple of years, part of a different Barça, and the future closes in on him, unknowable, unthinkable.

Villa will have no part in it. Villa, who has flitted in and out of the picture since Leo was eighteen, here and gone and now here again. Ripped them apart in the Supercopa, kicked them out of the Champions League, and now on the last day they’ve lost the league to him as well. And then there are the spaces in between, Villa hanging off Leo’s teammates in rojiblanco when the whistle blows, his tight smiles and fine hands, his ghost in Leo’s game. 

Case in point, all Leo’s senses are bending towards the place he knows Villa is right now, and the more he won’t let himself look, the worse it gets, crawling second skin. The minute Villa says something, Leo’s body revolts, snaps to attention. He already knows there’s nothing he wants to hear, but that hardly matters.

“Are you all right?” Villa asks him again, and Leo is suddenly robbed of words and sick with frustration. Villa is right here but he’s a thousand miles away. And he shouldn’t be here with Leo while he sits in his sweat and filth, he should be celebrating somewhere Leo doesn’t have to look at him.

Villa is watching him with a peculiar look on his face.

“You will be,” he tells Leo eventually, before looking away like he’s said his piece. Like that’s it, like it’s something you can only see clearly from his side.

“How would you know?”

His voice is not his own, and his chest seethes to hear it, corrosive and ugly and totally out of his control. It catches Villa off guard. He leaves himself wide open as their eyes meet, and Leo can guess what he’s thinking because everyone has the same mythic faith in him: of course Messi will be all right. Of course Messi will go on. He’s only ever been himself, doesn’t know how to be anything else, but that just makes the bad times worse.

Then Villa’s lips thin and his eyes flare, pissed off in spite of himself. Leo knows that look, stab of recognition between his ribs, like anticipation. But Villa just sighs and scrubs a hand over his face like he’s tired, like he’s had enough.

“You don’t know how much time you still have.” Villa’s mouth curls at the bitter taste to his words, and then he smiles of all things, like it’s funny. “It’s crazy what you’ve done already, you probably don’t know that either.”

“I’m not a kid,” Leo snaps, more angry than he knows what to do with, or something like that. His mouth has gone dry and if he never wanted to look at Villa again a minute ago, now he can’t tear his eyes away. “And you’re not an old man, Guaje. Stop talking like one.”

Villa’s smile isn’t going away.

“I heard you’re going to America,” Leo admits finally.

Villa’s eyebrows shoot up, “What, how did you,” before he realizes how stupid he’s being, and then it visibly clicks for maybe the first time since he went away, how his place in Leo’s life hasn’t disappeared, just been dispersed into miscellanea, secondhand stories and rumors and brief meetings around shared points, a dull echo of the years they’d spent circling each other. A relationship without a future.

“I’ve done everything there is to do, here,” Villa explains, and it sounds wrong to hear someone like Villa say it, after he fought so hard and so long to get here. Villa doesn’t like the way it comes out, either, because he tries to turn it into a joke: “And I don’t have another year playing Simeone’s football in me, either.”

“Maybe you should have stayed with us, then,” Leo retorts, before he’s totally, abruptly horrified with himself, the lump rising in his throat. Villa just laughs again, shaking his head, and Leo doesn’t have anything to lose. Then, painfully, “Why’d you leave?”

Villa opens his mouth but Leo cuts him off before he can get the words out properly, can’t bear to let Villa answer it because he knows exactly what he’s going to say, and even if it’s the truth Leo wants to believe it too badly to trust it—

“I know you wanted to play, you’ve said all that. People aren’t going to stop asking until you give a different answer, you know.”

Leo knows he didn’t do anything that couldn’t have been fixed, knows Villa doesn’t hold grudges, but somehow it’s worse when Leo is the only one who hasn’t moved on, especially now that he doesn’t want to, now that Villa is out of reach.

“Or until I go away,” Villa replies. “They won’t care what I do over there.”

Villa admits hard truths so cheaply there’s no defending against them. Leo gets the terrible urge to hurt him, tell him that no one will care, and the next moment he feels sick.

When Villa speaks again, he’s suddenly more careful, like he’s trying to translate it into something Leo can understand as he goes.

“This happened to me before, with Raúl. I took his shirt, so I was supposed to hate him or something. But I barely knew him, you know? I almost gave up on the seven to make it go away, but Pepe—my friend, Pepe Reina—told me he’d never talk to me again if I did.”

Leo remembers. Villa has been the seven of Spain for so long, the legend who conquered Europe and kept their world cup dream alive, that it’s hard to picture him as a skinny, nameless kid getting eaten alive by the establishment. By the time Leo had known who Villa was, he’d already seemed fully formed, and now that it’s too late, too late, he wants to know where Villa came from, what he was like before Leo could have known him.

“Your place is here,” Villa is saying. “So you’ll stay, others will come and go, and people will talk. Right now it’s me, but someday it’ll be Neymar, or…or who the fuck knows. If you don’t forget about it, you’ll go crazy.”

“I thought we’d have longer,” Leo says before he can think, but it’s suddenly so important to get it out. “Then your leg, and last year was…not good. It was over as soon as it started.”

Villa reaches out a hand and ruffles Leo’s hair, but it’s shorter than it was before, and his fingers rasp against his scalp.

“I didn’t mean to forget the good things, too, dumbass,” Villa teases him, grinning, then stands up and stretches. When he says sincerely, “That was the best year,” Leo realizes in a rush that he means goodbye.

“You’re leaving?” he says stupidly.

“Could you tell Xavi? I think he’s drowning himself in the showers.” Villa frowns, as if it’s hitting him all over again that he doesn’t belong here anymore, and he’s immediately, reluctantly apologetic. “Maybe now isn’t the right time.”

“Yeah, I’ll. Guaje. David.”

Villa gives him a smile, reaches for his hair again, and before Leo knows what he’s doing, he’s on his feet and pulling Villa into him. As Villa’s arms close around him time collapses, and he doesn’t want to let go. Away from the euphoria and the stadium lights and the thundering crowd, Villa is no longer invincible, untouchable, but the feeling is the same. His chin digs into Leo’s shoulder as his smile widens. His hands clench at Leo’s back, fingers caught on his shirt. His hair is soft against his cheek, dripping down his neck. The curve of his spine is almost fragile under Leo’s palm.

And then it’s all gone.

When he sees Villa’s tears a month later, he’s angry all over again. It doesn’t last because nothing does, and this time, he wants to forget. 

**Fall 2017**

It feels like more than three years when Leo gets back to his room in the midst of another shitty international break, new start for Argentina that just confirms nothing’s changed, turns on the television to catch the highlights of the day and sees him. Just background noise on Leo’s side of the world, cameo of an old and mostly forgotten face in football, and for the first time in as long as he can remember he wishes he were back in Spain instead.

He’s older, slower, face bearded and lined, but he’s shining with happiness and all Leo can think is that he looks just the same as he did. A couple seconds, and then Leo is alone again.

He hasn’t kept up with Villa since he left, not the way he has with Ronaldinho and Deco, even Eto’o. Leo’s heart has only broken that once, in the summer of 2008. With Villa, the feeling is different, complicated, somehow tainted by the ways he himself has changed. He still hears things from his teammates, about Villa’s new life and his old one, but he doesn’t listen, doesn’t ask. It’s been enough to know he’s doing well, the way he did before he even knew Leo’s name. 

Now, though. Villa’s smile brings him so close to a lost time and place, in between so many things he’s done, and people he’s been, now, that it no longer means what he wants it to. And for the first time since Villa left, Leo feels a terrible sense of loss.


End file.
